Those of you who have been enjoying Hannu Rajaniemi’s beautiful, compacted, effervescent jewel-like short stories in Nova Scotia, and the most recent issue of Interzone, will be as excited as I am to hear that he’s just secured himself a whopping three book deal with Gollancz.
How exciting is that?
ayeahmur 
Nice to see Gollancz is still a viable company–one wonders about the fate of these venerable companies in the explosive world of 21st century publishing. It’s a good time for SF, some fine writers out there raising the field above the drek (though people like Timothy Zahn and Kevin J. Anderson are still around to remind us that hacks will always be with us).
Good luck to Mr. Rajaniemi, I envy him his success…
Make sure you read him, Cliff. He’s just tremendous.
Aren’t most of the publishing companies part of enormous-faceless-global entities now? Should give them a bit extra buffer from the financial doodoo for the time being I would think.
I think the problem is that publishing companies are part of larger media conglomerates and if they don’t raise their bottom line, show impressive profits, those moguls will dump them like week-old bread. I think you’re going to see more and more houses cut loose, pieced off and sold in the next three years and it will be the BEST thing to happen to writers since Joe Gutenberg printed his first Bible. The corporate mentality has produced the worst writing imaginable and encouraged derivative hack work. POD and the new technologies offer writers all sorts of alternatives, allowing them to bypass dingbat editors and greedhead agents. Interesting times ahead…
Sorry, Cliff – I never got round to answering this. I’m no expert on how the industry works, but the converse of what you’re suggesting is that without the financial backing of those large conglomerates, it may become nigh on impossible for authors to develop any kind of professional career. Surely we’d also be seeing an end to the author’s advance and marketing spend in that case?
So on one hand you *might* have well have a freeing up of what people feel they are “allowed” to write, but on the other hand because writers are no longer feeling that they have to target their work at a particular market, might that affect their potential sales.
All of which is to say – is writing an art or a business? Should we give the people what they want to read or what *we* want to give them?